The Buster Keaton Collection Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.5
Overall		5.0

The Buster Keaton Collection Blu-ray Movie Review

Flathats and Pratfalls

There's some irony here; Buster Keaton, the man who seldom smiled onscreen, has kept his audiences grinning—from the opening intertitles to "The End"—for over ninety years now. In the early 1920s, he earned the sobriquet "The Great Stone Face," carving out a comic niche with a deadpan, blasted-from-granite demeanor that made Charlie Chaplin look like a weepy sap in comparison. His most typical onscreen persona—an effete, book-educated but street-dumb young man of privilege— has given him a reputation as the thinking man's pratfaller, the intellect's vaudevillian, but his films are as warm as they are clever, both deeply human and incredibly funny.

Though the latter part of his career was marred by alcoholism and a lack of creative control, few actor/directors can claim the kind of winning streak Keaton had throughout the 1920s, when he produced a series of shorts and features that—if not exactly blockbusters in their own time—are now regarded as amongst the greatest comedies ever made. Over the past three years, distributor Kino-Lorber has released nearly all of Keaton's output from this period on Blu-ray—the only major omission is 1928's The Cameraman, Buster's first under contract with MGM—and they've gathered them all together in one massive 14-disc box set, including College, which is exclusive here until March 2013. If you're a Keaton fan and you've somehow avoiding buying the individual releases up to now, you'll want to snap up this collection immediately. And if you're new to silent cinema but willing to give it a go, you couldn't do any better than to begin with Keaton. Read on for a run-down of everything that's included in the set, with links to comprehensive reviews of each title.

Screenshots from "College," exclusive to this set until March 2013.

• Buster Keaton Short Films Collection: Between 1920 and 1923, Buster Keaton made 19 two-reel shorts, gag-heavy experiments in comedic tone that found the newly established actor/director discovering his own brand of sophisticated slapstick. Kino International has gathered together all 19 of these short films in a three-disc set that also includes outtakes, “visual essays,” and more.
• The Saphead: Buster Keaton's first feature is atypical in almost every way—it's more melodrama than comedy, it's short on pratfalls, and Keaton had next to no say in the production creatively—but this was the role that made him a star, and it's worth watching just to see this transitional phase in his career.
• Our Hospitality: Keaton was essentially a hired gun in The Saphead, but in Our Hospitality he took his first real swing at telling a sustained, feature-length comedic story, about a city boy who wanders into a rural blood feud.
• Sherlock Jr. /Three Ages: Double feature time! Here, Kino has paired the 44-minute meta-movie Sherlock Jr. —in which Buster, a dreaming projectionist, enters the world of cinema—with Three Ages, which tells a similar love story in three different historical settings.
• The Navigator: A slapstick-on-the-high seas adventure that would become Keaton’s biggest box office success, The Navigator is known for the underwater scene—filmed in the frigid waters of Lake Tahoe—where Buster descends to the ocean floor in an old-fashioned diving suit and sword fights with a swordfish.
• Seven Chances: Keaton’s least favorite of his own films is still a fun romp, with an unforgettably crazy chase sequence climax that involves hundreds of money-grubbing old maids, a precarious dangle from a crane, locomotive near-misses, and an epic avalanche that has Keaton weaving and dodging between tumbling six-foot-tall boulders.
• Go West / Battling Butler: Two of Keaton’s most under-seen and under-appreciated pictures, Go West and Battling Butler find Buster exploring different sides of his comedic character—the former shows a nearly Charlie Chaplin-esque sentimentality, while the latter reveals a capability for genuinely brutal violence.
• The General: Keaton’s masterpiece, a madcap train-bound chase that was a box-office bust upon it's 1927 release, but has since gone on to be recognized as one of the greatest comedies of the silent era. Or any era, for that matter.
• College: Made between The General and Steamboat Bill, College often gets lost in the Keaton filmography shuffle, but it’s plenty effective as a small-scale story of a nerd who aspires to collegiate athletics to impress the girl he loves.
• Steamboat Bill, Jr. : If The General is his masterpiece, Steamboat Bill, Jr. might be Keaton’s most iconic work, featuring his famous, death-defying stunt, where he stands beneath a two-ton wall as it falls over, the presence of a tiny, frame-fitting window the only thing that keeps him from being squashed like a bug.
• Lost Keaton: Sixteen Comedy Shorts: This two-disc collections gathers together the 16 two-reel talkie shorts that Keaton did for Educational Pictures—a “Poverty Row” B-movie studio—after he was shunned by the big studios. There are a few rarely seen gems here, but most of the shorts are dull and unfunny and an ill-use of Buster’s talents. Still, for fans, these are worth seeing at least once.

The Buster Keaton Collection Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Feel free to check out the links above for comprehensive picture quality reviews of each title, but you'll quickly find them redundant. Kino has done a uniformly excellent job bringing these films to Blu-ray, where they look drastically better than they ever have before on home video. Yes, the films are by and large presented "as is," so you will notice some age-related print damage—specks, vertical scratches, slight contrast/bright fluctuations—but for films that are pushing 90 years old or more, the damage is negligible. What you will notice is the newfound clarity, with fine details and textures that could've never been resolved on DVD. Just as importantly, Kino has steered away from harsh digital manipulations like noise reduction and edge enhancement, leaving the picture wonderfully, naturally filmic. These films are simply a joy to watch in high definition.

The Buster Keaton Collection Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Once again, you can check out the individual titles for audio quality overviews, but that will probably be unnecessary. Using a mix of older and newly commissioned scores—presented in lossless or uncompressed codecs—Kino has kept the musical accompaniment complementary and unobtrusive and appropriately old-timey. No complaints here.

The Buster Keaton Collection Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There are no special features exclusive to the box set, but most of the discs are modestly stocked with supplementary material, from audio commentaries and outtakes, to video essays, bonus shorts, and more. See the individual titles for details.

As for the packaging, the collection is a sturdy set, with the 14-discs divvied up between four standard multi-disc jewel cases, held together in a cardboard slipcase. It's nothing fancy, but it looks dandy on a shelf.

The Buster Keaton Collection Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

One of the most iconic American entertainers of all time, Buster Keaton was a genius of physical comedy, a pratfalling vaudevillian whose stoic onscreen persona set him apart from the more hammy comics of his day. Kino-Lorber's massive 14- disc set is a near-definitive record of the most lauded stretch of Keaton's career, from his innovative early shorts to the twin triumphs of The General and Steamboat Bill, Jr. The collection ends on a low note, with a series of so-so shorts Buster did for B-movie studio Educational Pictures—when he was on the outs from Hollywood—but everything else is silent cinema gold, endlessly watchable and gorgeously presented in high definition. If you've been buying the individual releases as they've come out, I see no real reason to sell/trade them for the box set—unless you're desperate to save some shelf space—but those who've held out until now should snap up this set immediately. Highly recommended!